ABSTRACT
This chapter provides three distinct periods relevant to understanding public attitudes and anxieties about hazardous waste, social group political participation in siting decisions, and their effects on facility siting outcomes. In Michigan, waste facility developers must obtain a permit from the Department of Environmental Quality before construction can begin. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, public concern about hazardous waste and grassroots organizing against new facility siting was generated by several well-publicized and controversial cases such as those in Love Canal, New York, and in Times Beach, Missouri. Because the breadth of social forces contributing to the temporal patterns have a decidedly institutional character, disparate siting can be viewed as a form of indirect institutional discrimination. However, to firmly establish the role that historical context plays in disparate siting, more longitudinal studies are needed. Thomas H. Fletcher documents affluent white communities’ effective use of delay strategies to oppose hazardous waste facility siting in Michigan during the 1980s.
